y towards the same
spot.

"No," he answered. "It is not there."

"Agreed," said I.

We went in again, shut the door, and resumed our seats. I was thinking
how best to improve this advantage, if it might be called one, when he
took up the conversation in such a matter of course way, so assuming that
there could be no serious question of fact between us, that I felt myself
placed in the weakest of positions.

"By this time you will fully understand, sir," he said, "that what
troubles me so dreadfully, is the question, What does the spectre mean?"

I was not sure, I told him, that I did fully understand.

"What is its warning against?" he said, ruminating, with his eyes on the
fire, and only by times turning them on me. "What is the danger? Where
is the danger? There is danger overhanging, somewhere on the Line. Some
dreadful calamity will happen. It is not to be doubted this third time,
after what has gone before. But surely this is a cruel haunting of _me_.
What can _I_ do!"

He pulled out his handkerchief, and wiped the drops from his heated
forehead.

"If I telegraph Danger, on either side of me, or on both, I can give no
reason for it," he went on, wiping the palms of his hands. "I should get
into trouble, and do no good. They would think I was mad. This is the
way it would work:--Message: 'Danger! Take care!' Answer: 'What danger?
Where?' Message: 'Don't know. But for God's sake take care!' They
would displace me. What else could they do?"

His pain of mind was most pitiable to see. It was the mental torture of
a conscientious man, oppressed beyond endurance by an unintelligible
responsibility involving life.

"When it first stood under the Danger-light," he went on, putting his
dark hair back from his head, and drawing his hands outward across and
across his temples in an extremity of feverish distress, "why not tell me
where that accident was to happen--if it must happen? Why not tell me
how it could be averted--if it could have been averted? When on its
second coming it hid its face, why not tell me instead: 'She is going to
die. Let them keep her at home'? If it came, on those two occasions,
only to show me that its warnings were true, and so to prepare me for the
third, why not warn me plainly now? And I, Lord help me! A mere poor
signal-man on this solitary station! Why not go to somebody with credit
to be believed, and power to act!"

When I saw him in this state, I saw t